Stain of the Berry (24 page)

Like many others, I know precious little about the Arctic. I know the Arctic Circle is invisible, and marks the southern limit of the area where the sun doesn't rise on the winter solstice or set on the summer solstice. The pilot told me the Arctic includes the Arctic Ocean, thousands of islands and the northern parts of Europe, Asia and North America including regions of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, Siberia and Russia's Far East. Millions of acres of wilderness forest are set aside for parks, military reserves and wildlife refuges.

Even though it was late July, part of me still expected to deplane into a winter tundra environment with growling polar bears and tusky walruses in the not too far off distance. Instead, it was a beautiful day, the temperature in the comfortable teens, with dazzling sun reflecting brightly off the water we'd just crossed.

The Hummer that awaited us tried hard to look rough and tough in a rough and tough environment with 100 of 163

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roll bars and some dirt and dust caked to its underbelly, but it was still a Hummer. I was surprised to find Alex Canyon sitting behind the wheel when Maheesh and I climbed into the back seat. He said nothing and started driving. No sign of Grette the Giant-which was fine with me.

We didn't have far to go. Obviously the airstrip had been built for convenience by whoever owned the property we were on. And in this case convenience meant: build me a place to land my plane that's not too far away from my humongous cedar lodge getaway perched attractively over an Arctic river valley. I've always thought of getaway homes as ironic; in general, the people who can afford them really have very little to get away from.

The Hummer did its best to give us a luxuriously bumpy ride, and in short order delivered us to the lodge, where it parked under a portico at the front entrance. Maheesh led me out, Alex stayed in the vehicle. We made it up three steps onto the front porch and then entered the rustic-by-design maw of the house. I was, shamelessly, impressed. I'm not much of a cabin/lake person, but if I were, this would be the ultimate.

The comfort and luxuriousness of the place enveloped me like a blanket as soon as I entered. There were oversized fireplaces, intricate tapestries flowing down high walls, works of art that were "country"

but not mawkishly so, thick carpets, dark, polished woods and tall, wide windows that took advantage of every possible scenic view surrounding the place, inviting nature in and making it part of the decor.

Somehow it worked, and if I hadn't known better, I would have believed this house had grown from a seed right alongside the indigenous berry bushes and shrubs and had blossomed into this perfection. Well, a seed propagated by one or two of the fellas from
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

"There is someone who would very much like to see you," Maheesh said, once we were fully inside and my eyes had returned to their normal size.

At the sound of his words my pulse began to thread wildly; I could feel it at my wrist and neck like a wee racehorse under my skin.

Sereena.

I was going to see Sereena. I was finally going to find out what the hell was really going on. For, despite Maheesh's story on the flight over here, I still had no idea why she'd suddenly disappeared.

Maheesh patted me lightly on the back and regarded me with an uncomplicated kindness in his eyes.

"Please follow me?"

With my host leading, we walked through a cavernous sitting room that faced a massive outdoor wooden deck over water. He opened one of the glass doors, politely allowing me to go before him.

And that was when the world stopped making sense.

There was someone waiting for me.

Someone with a face that stopped my heart cold.

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He looked pretty good.

For a dead guy.

I've heard people talk about having their mind play tricks on them. I've never figured that one out, never quite believed it...except if drugs were involved. But unless Maheesh Ganesh slipped something into my coffee on the plane, I wasn't under the influence of anything stronger than pure shock and disbelief.

The man standing in front of me had died six years ago in a skiing accident. My mother's brother, my friend Anthony's ex-lover, my uncle: Lawrence Wistonchuk. Yet there he was, older certainly, thinner than I remembered, holding out two shaking hands towards me, a tremulous smile on his face.

"My God," were the first words from his lips. "How I've wished for this moment."

Although the feeling was mutual, I was far from being able to express it in words.

When I first came to the big city from small town Saskatchewan to attend university, my mother's brother, Lawrence, took me under his mighty wing. It was not, however, through any sense of duty or responsibility for his sister's kid, for in actuality I hardly knew him before then. He and my mother did not get along. Lawrence helped me out because, as I later learned, he saw in me a younger version of himself.

I don't know how accurate he was, but I've always been honoured he thought so.

Lawrence and Anthony, couple extraordinaire, hosted these extravagant dinners and parties, populated with bizarre and interesting people, and I was always invited. My Uncle Lawrence defined what it meant to be larger than life. He was attractive, well-mannered, well-educated and well-heeled. I wanted to be him. When he travelled, which was often, I was given the keys to the house, the cars, and the impossibly bountiful lifestyle that went with them. It was almost too much for a nineteen-year-old farm boy. I'll never know why, but he trusted me implicitly with all of it. Tragically, Lawrence did not return from his last trip.

He was fifty-one at the time.

In his will, Uncle Lawrence left me a sum of money with one simple instruction: Buy a Dream. I was a Saskatoon police constable when Lawrence died. I wasn't completely unhappy with my job, but I wasn't thrilled with it either. I liked the work but I just wasn't cut out to wear a uniform or drive a car with a bubble. I knew becoming a private detective in a small Canadian city was a risk, career-wise and financially, but in all other ways it promised freedom. It was the money from Lawrence that allowed me to quit my steady police job, pay off the mortgage on my house, and survive the first months of my new life.

As instructed, I had bought a dream.

And now, in this unknown land near the top of the world, standing before the ghost of my uncle, feeling alone, bewildered... frankly, freaked out...I felt as if I was living in a dream. And I couldn't decide if it was a good one or a bad one.

"Russell," his soft voice reached out for me through the haze of my confusion. "I know this is a surprise.

I'm hoping a pleasant one. Please, won't you come closer?"

I realized I hadn't moved a centimetre since first setting eyes on my uncle's face. I remained cemented to the floor just outside the doors that led onto the mighty deck that hung over a bay of water fed by a trickling river. I was blind to the extravagance of nature laid out before us as I turned my pale face to the sky, gulped at the fresh air and begged for the sun's warm fingers to massage the blood back into it.

"Perhaps a walk?" the man suggested, taking a step closer.

I looked at him. My uncle. Uncle Lawrence. The last time I'd seen him I'd dropped him off at the Saskatoon airport and was more interested in getting back to the shiny new Jag he was letting me drive in his absence than in long goodbyes. More and more over the previous several years he'd been going off on 102 of 163

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his "jaunts"-as he called them-slyly intimating he was off to rendezvous with another in a long list of mystery lovers he never identified. He and Anthony had broken off their relationship years before, but I suspected my uncle had never quite found the same intensity with a partner again and used his jaunts as the remedy...or perhaps ointment for an unhealed wound. That particular trip he was off to ski some impossibly glamorous mountain in some impossibly glamorous European principality with impossibly glamorous friends and promised to return in several weeks. But he never did. He'd been buried in an avalanche and we never saw him again.

The man before me now certainly resembled that person. He was, what?...fifty-seven now...yet he looked older, thin, gaunt. Uncle Lawrence had been a robust man with a healthy appetite for everything life had to offer; he had dark, wild hair that sprung from his head like curly tentacles and eyes full of mischief that sparkled when he laughed his uproarious laugh. But now his shoulders were narrower, his chest deflated, his hair grey and thinning, and his eyes had dimmed to that of a normal, mortal man. And God how I still loved him.

I fell into my uncle's arms and he into mine and we remained that way for many minutes, no words required. I am not a man given easily to tears, but if they didn't fall they certainly welled up in great pools about my eyes. I could feel his fingers burrow into the muscle of my back and the bristle of his cheek against my own. We'd been through so much together; he'd taught me so many great things, even in death.

I could not believe my grand fortune of having him back. Even if this did turn out to be a dream, it was, I now knew, a damn good one.

Finally we pulled away from one another and took another minute to hold each other at arm's length, studying the other's features.

"Come," he eventually said. "I've a snack and water packed up for us. Let's take a hike."

I had no idea what time it was, and I'd never be able to tell by the sun, which seemed happily nestled in the sky for the duration of the summer. It looked early, but was likely late afternoon. Yet as big a day as it had already been, I was nowhere near ready for a rest, and gladly accepted my uncle's invitation. He gathered up a backpack, threw a light sweater over his shoulders and offered me one and off we went, down a steep set of steps off the deck to ground level at the rear of the massive house. Surrounding us was a topography unlike any I'd seen before: vast plateaus of limestone and sandstone bedrock, intricate webbings of deep river valleys and dramatic hill-like structures formed by eons of erosion. I let my uncle set the direction and pace while I tried to take in the strangeness of my surroundings and companion. For several minutes we just walked. No talking. At one point my uncle reached into his pack and pulled out two apples and handed me one. It was huge, so big in fact that for the first few bites I had to hold onto it with both hands, like I remember doing as a young boy eating an apple half this size, with hands twice as small. It tasted fresh, just the right amount of tart to invigorate my taste buds, juicy and sweet. We listened to each other's satisfied crunches and smiled at one another. I was certain we had once done this exact same thing together in another place, another time. When we were both finished, I thought I was ready to speak. I'd have to start slow.

"Where are we exactly?"

"We're near the northeast coast of Somerset Island, north of what’s known as the Arctic Circle. Prince of Wales Island is to the west of us, Baffin Island to the east, the Queen Elizabeth Islands are to the north, not much else after that. The only permanent settlement on Somerset is Fort Ross, an old trading post quite a ways south from here." He was filling the empty space between us with details.

I nodded and kept my eyes where they'd be safe, on our vivid surroundings of every shade of gray and green and blue. We veered off from the river, the terrain barren, craggy, scrubby with wild flowers and alive with fowl: snow buntings, sandpipers and rough-legged hawks. "Is this where you've been all this time?" I asked.

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acquaintance of ours. He's been kind enough to allow us to meet here. This place is only habitable a couple months each year, if that. The middle of last month they still had massive snow drifts in this area.

And last year the first snow of the winter was August eighteenth." He kept on, "They tell me the ice was late breaking up this year; it kept the belugas out of Cunningham Inlet until a couple of weeks ago. They'll leave again sometime in August."

"And you with them?"

He let out a soft laugh. "Ah, no, my boy. By then I'll be long gone."

I came to a stop and put a hand on my uncle's forearm, turning him so we were face to face. I'd had enough banter. I wanted-needed-facts. "What is going on, Uncle Lawrence? What happened to you? How can you still be alive? Where have you been all these years? Who are you? Who is Maheesh Ganesh?

Who is Alex Canyon? Where is Sereena?"

He nodded toward a grouping of rocks that would make for decent seating and we each found a spot.

"Oh my dear, Russell," he began. "As lovely as it is to sit here with you in the sun and see your face again, hear your voice, ruffle your hair, I'd truly hoped it wouldn't come to this."

Nice.

"And, although it was wholly innocent on your behalf, it was you who forced us into this."

My temper felt a spike in temperature. "Me? What did I do? I didn't put myself on that plane this morning. I didn't..." And then I thought better of it. There was so much more going on here, more than I was anywhere near to comprehending. Perhaps I needed to shut up for a bit. "I just want to understand," I told my uncle. "I want to know what I should feel about seeing you alive. Should I be happy, angry...suspicious? Do I have you back for good, Uncle Lawrence?"

"I'll answer your questions, Russell. As best as I'm able. Please be patient."

Patience. Not my strong suit. "I can only try."

He laughed again. "That's my boy. So much like me. Curious as they come, exuberant, lively.